Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong

Willine was a single mother with an ex-husband always late on child support payments, when he sent them at all. For forty-three years, she worked at Dallas’s First National Bank. Her sense of family was so strong, she says, that she insisted her two daughters and Sonny go to church together three times a week. She never criticized her absent ex-husband because she wanted her children to make up their own minds about him. She and Linda became as close as best friends during Linda’s pregnancy.

On Linda’s seventeenth birthday, she and seventeen-year-old Sonny were married in a Baptist church packed with fellow high schoolers, some no doubt noticing the bride’s baby bump beneath her flowing, pleated white dress. That was February 1971. The boy arrived in September.

He was named after Lance Rentzel, the Dallas Cowboys star wide receiver who the year before was arrested for exposing himself to a ten-year-old girl. At the window of the maternity ward, his father saw that the newborn’s head was misshapen: too long, too narrow. His mother, a petite woman, delivered him at 9 pounds, 12 ounces.

“What’s wrong with his head?” his father asked, as tears rolled down his cheeks.

“It’ll get better,” one of his sisters said. “It’ll be fine, I know it will.”

Linda took a part-time job at a grocery store. Sonny worked at a bakery and delivered newspapers, but fatherhood didn’t bring with it a sudden maturity. As a minor, he had made frequent appearances in juvenile court. In 1974, when his son was two and a half, and he and Linda had already divorced, Sonny Gunderson spent his first night in jail as an adult. He had been arrested for breaking into a car.

Their marriage lasted for just over two years. Linda would claim in her book that Sonny had been so rough with her that her neck and arms were bruised. Years later, the ex-husband admitted that he had slapped her, but only once.

Gunderson told his family that he spent months after the divorce in a zombie-like state. He wanted to fix what he had broken, but had no idea how. He often sat across the street from his son’s day care center and watched the boy play on the playground. He couldn’t pay the child support, or wouldn’t. He ignored the demand notes as they piled up in his mailbox, accusingly.

To his father’s family, Armstrong was Lance Edward Gunderson. They still saw him at Christmases and other family gatherings, where he played with his cousins. They still have photos of him, yellowed and fading. His grandmother has a 4×4-inch photo album made for her by Armstrong’s mother. Linda signed the album with her boy’s name, “To Mom-o Willine. Love, Lance.”

Willine “Mom-o” Gunderson is Armstrong’s paternal grandmother. In nearly every photo of her with the infant Lance, she is kissing him, her eyes closed, the kind of moment a grandmother wants to last forever. Her son is partly to blame for how short-lived it really was.

Whenever he saw Lance, Gunderson acted like a kid himself. While his mother and two sisters watched, he gave the boy rides on his ten-speed bike and motorcycle. Inevitably, some outings ended with acrimony. Lance once came home with a quarter-sized burn on his calf where it had rubbed against the motorcycle’s exhaust pipe. Another time, he suffered a bloody toe when his foot became tangled in the spokes of a bicycle. Linda blamed Sonny for his neglect and chastised Willine for allowing the boy to get hurt while in her care.

Willine told the young mother, “You can’t keep him in a golden cage his whole life.”

Linda snapped back, “I’m the one that knows what’s best for him.”

“She was maternal,” Willine says, “but she was so young, she didn’t understand that babies love more than one person in their life. She didn’t want him to love anybody but her. But babies love anybody that will love them. That doesn’t take from the love that they have for their mother.”

When Linda filed for divorce—on February 15, 1973—she just couldn’t stand Sonny anymore. She married Terry Armstrong, a salesman, in May 1974, a year after her divorce papers were signed. Though Sonny couldn’t know it at the time, his life with Lance would soon be over.

The Armstrongs would eventually move away, ending any contact with the Gundersons, and Terry officially adopted Lance as his son. Linda said in her autobiography that Willine agreed it was best for Lance to never see the Gundersons again. But whenever someone suggests as much to Willine her mouth drops open. “Ooh, no, no,” she says.

Willine last had direct contact with Linda and her family when Lance was five or six. She had gone to his maternal grandmother’s house with Christmas gifts for him. “Linda told me not to take anything more from you,” the grandmother told Willine. “What little stuff you give him is not worth the trouble Linda has with Lance after he has had some contact with you.”

Shaking with distress, Willine quietly said, almost to herself, “You’ve got no right to tear a family apart,” and walked away with the presents in her hands and tears in her eyes.

For years after Lance was gone, Willine and Micki kept his picture inside oval gold lockets that hung around their necks. In his grandmother’s locket, he is an infant, maybe ten months old, wearing a fire-engine-red romper. In his aunt’s, a toddler with a goofy smile.

To this day, Willine is haunted by the last time she saw Lance. She was babysitting him, and he was about four. His mother swung by to pick him up, and found him under the Gundersons’ dining room table. The grandmother remembers the boy saying, happily, “I’m just going to live under here. I won’t take up too much room. I’m just going to live under this table.” But his mother grabbed Lance by the arm and led him through the front door, the boy crying as they went. She slammed the door. The grandmother never saw the boy again.

The Gundersons had no idea that the Armstrongs were living in Richardson, a northern suburb of Dallas, and had no money to hire a lawyer or investigator to find him. The Gundersons held out hope that Armstrong would come looking for them someday, maybe when he had children of his own. At their church—Four Mile Lutheran, which his relatives helped found and build east of Dallas 165 years ago—the congregation for years had prayed for Armstrong every Sunday.

The Gundersons wrote to Armstrong occasionally, but he never answered. They rarely called Linda’s family, and when they tried they heard only the click of a phone being put back into its cradle.

Linda’s brother, Alan, felt sorry for Sonny and was the Gundersons’ only source of information about the boy. He once came over to Sonny’s place and gave him a school picture of Armstrong, a color 8x10. The Gundersons inspected Lance’s face closely, the first time they had seen it in more than five years.

He had the same deep blue eyes as his father, and the same high cheekbones. They wondered if he possessed other family traits: Would Lance be hard and stubborn? Did he have problems with authority? Did he see the world in extremes? Did he hold grudges?

Armstrong’s grandmother is now nearly ninety. When she turned eighty, she moved in with Micki, who resides in one of Dallas’s most exclusive neighborhoods, among mansions and estates with guardhouses. Her husband, Mike Rawlings, was elected mayor in 2011.

Willine’s thick brown hair has turned snowy white. Her once rod-straight posture has become permanently bent. She uses a walker and needs thick glasses and bright lights to see. Her hearing is going, too, but her mind is sharp. Next to her bed she has photos of six of her seven grandchildren and six of her eleven great-grandchildren—but not a single photo of Lance Armstrong at any age, nor photos of any of his five children. It’s as if Lance Armstrong had never existed in her family.

CHAPTER 2

The last name is all that remains of Terry Armstrong. Just as she had erased Eddie Gunderson, Linda removed Terry. Divorce records show they were married fourteen years, until Lance was nearly seventeen. Linda, meanwhile, continues to represent herself as a single mother who raised her son alone.

In her career as a motivational speaker –that pays her as much as $20,000 a pop—there is hardly a word about Terry’s involvement in Lance’s life. (Some newspapers have quoted her saying the marriage lasted only until Lance was thirteen. She declined to be interviewed for this book.) In her autobiography, she never uses Terry’s name. She calls him “the Salesman” or “Sales.” The best allowance she makes for him is that “Sales coached Lance’s Little League team, he did do that. He gets some credit for effort there, but I’m not sure how much he enjoyed it. Lance wasn’t the budding baseball star Sales would have liked him to be.”

In truth, Terry Armstrong could not have been more different from Eddie Gunderson. One had been the cool bad boy in the Pontiac GTO spending late nights at R&B clubs rather than with his wife and newborn child. The other was the twenty-two-year-old son of a minister, a churchgoer with a steady job and an eagerness to be a father.

A wholesale food salesman who hawked barbecued meats and corn dogs to schools and businesses, he had met Linda Mooneyham Gunderson at a car dealership and was smitten with the cute, spunky brunette. He looked like the kind of guy who could buy a car with cash, which was its own sort of handsome. They started going steady and it fast-tracked into a marriage proposal. With Linda, Terry married into the role he had always wanted: father to a son. With Terry, Linda had found a solid, stable provider.

According to divorce records, and Terry himself, the two were married for most of the boy’s formative years—ages two through sixteen. In that time, Lance learned how to compete in his trademark way: as an irritable, cocky bruiser.

Both father and son were driven by an intensity that often turned to ruthlessness. Lance saw it when Terry coached his football teams and advised him in his early efforts in bike racing. Terry could be demanding, especially when his son didn’t meet his expectations.

At the boy’s first BMX bike race, Lance fell and started crying. Terry marched over to the fallen child and said, “That’s it, we’re going.” Then he grabbed Lance’s bike. “We’re done. No kid with my name’s gonna quit.” Properly admonished, or frightened, Lance got back on his bike and competed in another race. Terry thought it was proof of his son’s toughness.

When Lance was seven and then eight, he played for the Oilers, a team in a YMCA tackle football league in Garland, Texas. Terry Armstrong was one of the coaches. At the team’s first practice, Terry gathered the players and the fathers around him.

“Let me tell y’all about this football team we’re gonna have here,” he said. “If your kid’s not any good, he ain’t playing. This is not just a show-up-and-run-around situation. We’re going to win.”

Against the league’s rules, he videotaped other teams’ workouts and held after-school practices in the privacy of his backyard to gain an edge. His idea of a bedtime story for Lance was an old copy of a Vince Lombardi fire-and-brimstone speech about winners and losers. Once, when he believed Lance had loafed through a football game’s fourth quarter, he didn’t talk to him for a week. Lance would come to the dinner table, and he’d say, “You’re just a loser—you didn’t put the effort out.” Meanwhile, his team of eight-year-olds went undefeated through eleven games.

Terry and Linda never were a perfect match. Neither claims to have ever been madly in love, or even that love was the foundation for their union. Neither Linda Armstrong in her book, nor Terry Armstrong in interviews, can remember any details of their wedding.

Several of Lance’s pals say that his mother was more of a friend to him than a parent. They remember Lance once asking her to get dolled up so she could ride around in the limo he had rented for his prom, making it quite an uncomfortable trio—Lance, his prom date and his mother. Lance’s friends and some of his former coaches say Linda was a permissive parent who indulged her son’s every wish. (Example: He drove himself alone to his driver’s license test.)

So, according to Terry Armstrong, he became the disciplinarian by default. When Lance disobeyed or mouthed off—both frequent occurrences—Terry had a routine. He waited for Linda to come home. He armed himself with his fraternity paddle before telling Lance, “Grab your ankles!” Then he used the paddle against the growing young man’s rear end.

If Lance didn’t clean his room—not so much as a sock out of place, per the protocol of Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri, where Terry had been wrapped in a blanket and viciously beaten by other cadets—Terry administered two licks. Talk back? Two licks. Years later, Lance described those spankings as traumatic, saying that the pain was more emotional than physical.

Terry and Linda often fought about Lance’s schoolwork. Terry remembers, “I would say, ‘You can’t go outside until you get your homework done,’ and she would say, ‘Well, he’s my son and I make the rules.’ I would ask for his report card, and she would say, ‘I’ll handle it, he’s my son.’”

One perhaps inevitable result of the parental disagreements was that Lance became an angry, aggressive child. Classmates from middle school said he was a classic bully, “picking on people that were vulnerable and harassing them on a daily basis.” He always seemed to be fighting something or someone.

As he entered high school, Armstrong remained an outsider, a short, slight kid with Brillo Pad hair and a cowlick that could not be conquered by comb or brush. He was arrogant in sports, but less confident socially—at least partly because he had stopped playing football. It was Texas, after all, where football sopped up everyone’s attention.

Terry Armstrong said his son quit football in middle school because he became furious when teammates failed. He gravitated toward individual sports like running and swimming, where he alone could control the outcome. He was a natural there and his father pushed him because he didn’t think Lance would get to college based on his academics. “One thing I’ll always say about my son, and I still love him to death, but he’s not the brightest tool in the shop,” Terry says. “He did not have the discipline to go to school. That’s the one reason I pushed him so hard in athletics. I knew athletics was going to be his way to school. He was lazy. He didn’t want to study. He wanted to go run. He wanted to go ride his bike. He wanted to go play.”

Terry made sure Lance had all the advantages in sports and other extracurricular activities. The best catcher’s mitt. A brand-new drum set. Top-of-the-line bikes. A red Fiat convertible. “What Lance wanted, Lance got,” said Armstrong’s neighbor and close friend Adam Wilk.

Lance worked out with a small coterie of pals that included several future high-level athletes like Chann McRae, who became a cyclist on the Postal Service team with Armstrong. Though the young athletes mostly delighted in pushing each other to perform better, Lance’s joy did not come in winning competitions by an inch. He needed to humiliate his opponents. Wilk recalls him saying, “Did you wear your panties today? You are a weak pussy. You suck—why did you even show up?”

Although Lance did poorly in school, Linda was proud of his athletic accomplishments. Wilk said, “If it wasn’t for sports, you would look back and say Linda did a crappy job raising Lance.” Wilk didn’t know what Armstrong would have done with his life if it hadn’t been for his athletic gifts. “A juvenile delinquent, maybe in jail?” he said. “I can’t remember him having any other interests. He was focused on winning, and to me, he’s still fixated on it.”

Lance Armstrong was fourteen when he learned about Terry’s secret life. They were traveling to a swim meet in San Antonio. He saw Terry writing, then tossing away pieces of crumpled paper. The boy picked up a sheet of the paper and saw the beginnings of his father’s love letter to a mistress. To spare her the pain, he didn’t tell his mother. But Terry became an enemy to be crushed—another lost father.

Right away, Armstrong found a replacement: Rick Crawford, a professional triathlete. Crawford didn’t know what was in store when he met the fourteen-year-old Armstrong at a Dallas pool. They were swimming laps in adjacent lanes. Armstrong went all out to beat him. Crawford was impressed.

He’s not sure how it happened exactly, but Crawford—twelve years older, never a coach—helped Armstrong launch his triathlon career. Armstrong promptly became a star in the niche sport, someone race directors wanted at their event. They marketed him as a prodigy, a boy threatening to challenge the sport’s best athletes. Crawford was astonished at how quickly Armstrong excelled. His national triathlon ranking improved by the day, Crawford says, the number dropping “like shit through a goose.” They trained together for eighteen months.

Crawford says he was taken aback by Armstrong’s combativeness. He heard him at races tell competitors, “I’m going to kill you. You are pathetic.” He would say those things at the starting line and the finish. Crawford remembers telling him, “Lance, no. Not cool. Buddy, let your legs do the talking.”

On training rides, Crawford had to keep an eye on Armstrong, who saw every motorist as a threat. In a kind of bike rage, he would chase down cars that had come too close to him in order to curse and threaten the driver. He wouldn’t temper his emotions for anybody. Crawford noticed that was especially true when it came to the way Armstrong treated his father.

At first, nothing stood out to Crawford as unusual at the Armstrong residence in the Los Rios neighborhood, a solidly middle-class section of Plano. The Armstrongs lived in a simple brick ranch-style house: three bedrooms, 1,500 square feet, a patch of lawn, a couple green shrubs.

Then Crawford began to hear Armstrong’s stories of his family’s problems. He heard about Armstrong and his father taking swings at each other and landing on a glass coffee table, smashing it. “He was encouraged to be bad,” Crawford says. Family friends saw a teenager out of control.

While Linda and Terry Armstrong argued at home, Crawford spent more time with their son, training and traveling to events where they both were treated to free airfare and fancy hotel rooms because of their athletic abilities. That, too, was a learning experience. The night before a triathlon in Bermuda, Armstrong “borrowed” a scooter that Crawford had rented and returned it to the rental company hours late. Later, in a bungalow that housed several other professional triathletes, Armstrong broke glasses and bottles when he took a cricket bat and smacked a ball into the place’s wet bar.

Crawford had had enough. He was tired of doing the job of this kid’s parents who, in his view, were lousy. He pinned Armstrong against a wall and growled, “You’re done, dude.”

“Screw off,” Armstrong said, “you’re not my dad! Don’t ever talk to me again.”

As he had with his biological father and Terry Armstrong, he left Crawford behind.

“I guess you couldn’t blame him,” Crawford says. “He was already staying in five-star hotels and having people adore him.”

Crawford remembers Armstrong’s behavior as Oedipal. He says most of the father figures in Lance’s life have ended up as villains and that every girl he has ever dated looks exactly like his mother.

In turn, Armstrong calls Crawford a bitter, “crazy and angry” guy. He also points out that Crawford went on to help athletes dope. In 2012, years after he split from Armstrong, Crawford admitted to helping pro cyclists Levi Leipheimer and Kirk O’Bee of the United States Postal Service squad use performance-enhancing drugs. Crawford said he did it only because Armstrong had set the team’s standard of doping. He said those riders were neophytes who heard that Armstrong and other elite riders on the team were taking part in a sophisticated drug program. They only wanted to keep up. Still, Crawford later was fired from his coaching job at Colorado Mesa University for allegedly doping an athlete there, a charge he denies. As for the matter of Armstrong’s doping—might Crawford have ever helped a young triathlete bend the rules?

“No,” he said. “I would never put drugs into a young kid.”

Linda Armstrong always looked for people who could help Lance—and along came Scott Eder, a local sports promoter working for the sneaker company Avia. He crossed paths with Armstrong in 1986 at a biathlon in Dallas. After Armstrong won the event, Eder delivered a free pair of Avias to his house, and—one imagines—walked away with exactly what he was after.

Linda asked Eder, “Can you watch over my son, kind of act like his agent?”

Eder became, as Lance said later, “a coach meets agent meets big brother.”

Armstrong had already proven himself to be an amazing athlete. He was only thirteen when he won his first triathlon, an IronKids event, and was second in that year’s IronKids national championship. At fourteen, he was sneaking into races for adults, with Terry Armstrong changing the date on his birth certificate to make him eligible. The next year, he competed for the second time in the President’s Triathlon in Dallas, an event featuring many of the sport’s stars, like Mark Allen, an eventual six-time Ironman world champion.

A fifteen-year-old Armstrong wasn’t far behind the top competitors. He beat Allen in the swim. In the bike portion of that 1987 race, he pedaled alongside Allen and got his attention. “Are you Mark Allen?” Armstrong said. When Allen said yes, Armstrong remained by his side for nearly the rest of the event. Armstrong finished sixth, but made a name for himself as the next big thing in the sport.

Allen later told the President’s Triathlon race director, Jim Woodman, that the young Armstrong’s abilities were uncanny. “He couldn’t shake him, and that freaked him out,” Woodman said. The next year, Armstrong won the triathlon. He also won the Texas state championship, beating his own former mentor, Crawford, for the title. Triathlete magazine claimed that he would be one of the greatest athletes in the history of the sport.

By the time he was sixteen, he was making $20,000 a year and had turned pro. Eder was acting as his traveling secretary, event negotiator, marketing director and road manager. He compiled triathlon schedules, secured sponsors and budgeted for their races. Eder also arranged for Armstrong to spend two summers training in California with top triathletes.

In all, Eder told me, he traveled with Armstrong to more than twenty-five out-of-town races. He showed me the itineraries he had typed up on his typewriter. The travel—which included stays in expensive hotels like Bermuda’s Princess—was often paid for by the event sponsors. Armstrong was only a kid, and he already was being treated like a superstar. The Armstrongs didn’t need to spend a penny.

Linda has claimed to have been by her son’s side at most of those competitions. Eder differs. “She went to about three,” he says.

He saw the kid as a brawler with a touch of paranoia. If you glanced at him the wrong way, he might say, “What the hell are you looking at?” He’d sneak into a bar, get into a fight, and this underage boy would go back home with a bloodied nose and raw knuckles.

He once threw a Kestrel racing bike—one of the first generations of all-carbon-fiber racing bikes—across several lanes of road after his tire went flat during a Miami triathlon. Kestrel dropped its sponsorship of him. The tantrum had hurt Armstrong’s marketing appeal, especially since it was captured by television cameras.

This reputation preceded him, yet people in the sports world still wanted to glom on. They sensed that he had a great future. But the better Armstrong fared as an athlete, the more of his humility he lost. Already, no one was brave enough to stand up to him. He would get into fights at school. He would drink. He would drive too fast. His coaches and sponsors around town heard all about it, and couldn’t or wouldn’t stop it.

Eder said Armstrong’s relationships with father figures would always go bad for one reason or another. Once, Eder had to convince Jim Hoyt, the owner of the Richardson Bike Mart, that he should continue to sponsor Armstrong despite the teenager’s off-the-bike antics. Hoyt was another early benefactor, one who had been there nearly from the start. Armstrong was kicked out of the store at age twelve because he took gear he never returned, Hoyt told me. Then he was kicked out again at seventeen because Hoyt had co-signed a loan on Armstrong’s new white Chevy Camaro IROC Z28 and Armstrong had abused his generosity. Trying to outrun the police one night, Armstrong abandoned the car at an intersection before sprinting away on foot. Police impounded the car and showed up at Hoyt’s door because his name was on the vehicle’s registration.